Apple will never consider doing that. Their actions speak to the exact opposite: total control of their devices and ecosystem, non-cooperation with other companies on standards, stringent app store controls. They gain nothing, in their eyes, to allow that development model.
Even if they did it would take a tour de force to make reality. The whole iOS development stack very heavily depends on macOS — Xcode is written in Objective-C/Swift + AppKit for example and the iOS Simulator just runs the iOS userland in a phone frame and lets macOS furnish the Darwin half.
Practically speaking, they’d at minimum have to beef up the internal Yellow Box descendant they’d been previously using to make Safari and iTunes run on Windows (essentially porting large chunks of macOS to Windows) to be able to support Xcode, or following the direction of their more recent iCloud, Music, and TV apps write a WinUI-based version of Xcode for Windows paired with an all new iOS Emulator from scratch.
It’d be a huge investment with returns that are unclear at best.
Nah, they’d just need to clear up the license and the other megacorps would do the rest.
Any more info about this version of Yellow Box running on Windows? Apple’s Windows apps have always fascinated me.
I don’t have much, except that it seems that the versions used by Safari and iTunes are different and port different amounts of the OS.
The Safari version was considerably more complete and included the entire text rendering system as well as several era-appropriate Aqua UI widgets. It feels very much like a Mac app.
The iTunes version seems much more trimmed down, using Windows text rendering and win32 widgets in place of Cocoa/Aqua in most places. Accordingly, it feels more Windows-like.
It might be interesting to try to build a toy app against the Safari version just for kicks.
Which is sad because a lot more people might consider buying their products if one was able to try the products with non-ecosystem devices.
Their devices are well designed and generally last for a long time. They also retain their value in case you want to resell them.
Instead, I’m constantly weighing the lock-in from their walled garden - should I go all in or should remain in control over my devices.
I actually later like Apple hardware, especially since their model brought Apple-arm development that is completely awesome!
I'd buy one if I knew I could use it. The old Intel Macs shipped with UEFI and a fairly open architecture, even Apple couldn't control when the chipset was fully depreciated. When MacOS cut off 32-bit support suddenly, hardcore software aficionados could still use Bootcamp to run the software they bought. When Apple "vintage"-ized old iMacs and Macbooks, they could still install other OSes and live on. Apple doesn't have to support their hardware forever... but their lack of a serious depreciation model means that I have to trust MacOS wholeheartedly.
And MacOS isn't worth my trust as a user. Big Sur feels like Mac by way of Windows 8 - it's stepping deeper into a service-integrated product that won't respect my time or money. If Apple published their driver code or at least documented their hardware as a gesture of good faith, I'd trust them a lot more. But Asahi is on the ropes right now (who'da thunk) and Apple isn't stepping in to heroically save anyone. Like the Halloween papers, with teeth this time.
It's all so tiring. I like my Magic Trackpad on GNOME, but I don't think modern Mac hardware is worth locking myself in with Dr. Tim Strangelove and learning to love his software.
Hopefully future Qualcomm SDXE or Mediatek/Nvidia SystemReady Arm PCs will deliver an open-standard Arm platform with upstream Linux support. Until then, we have Apple Silicon Macs with:
> Asahi is on the ropes right nowOr on a path to long term sustainability?
https://asahilinux.org/2025/03/progress-report-6-14/
You're welcome to hold out hope as long as you'd like, people have said that stuff since 2019. Qualcomm seems to be nose-to-grindstone right now, Nvidia's SPARK offerings ended up being more niche than expected and Microsoft is happy to go full steam ahead on x86. The status quo on PC isn't really changed with Apple Silicon, and now that the work-from-home market has died down it's not entirely clear if computing as a whole is going to respond. Add tariffs into the equation and it doesn't seem likely that ARM will be getting any new license applicants anytime soon. Nvidia might make a cheeky laptop chip just to put their GPU in a form-factor that can frustrate Apple, but the ARM market continues to stay frozen.
I'm content with my dopey $150 Thinkpad and Linux. MacOS is untenable and headed down the dark monetization path that ruined Windows a long time ago. With my Macbook I have to constantly live in fear that Apple might break my package manager, disable third-party stores, remove virtualization or depreciate 32-bit programs.